Study Break
by Guardian Fox
Summary: Neptune is drowning in information at the hands of his own perfectionist tendencies. A strange noise echoing all over the library, keeps pulling him out of his concentration.


Neptune recognized that he was an over-achiever. He had never seen that as a bad thing.

Until now.

Neptune had crammed himself in the library, for almost thirteen straight hours. It was the last evening of the mid-semester break, and while Neptune's friends had pestered him to hang out with them on their last free night before being re-submerged in the dull drum of classes, telling him he'd spent _more_ than enough of his break in the library, Neptune couldn't bring himself to. For the entirety of the semester Neptune's thoughts had been consumed by one thing: he was finally old enough to design his own weapon.

Not being in a high enough grade to be eligible for serious weapon designing classes was never something that had tempered his enthusiasm in the subject. Back in his dorm, he had sketchbooks and schematics dated back years, showing the grand evolution of his weapon design addiction. Despite the embarrassing phase he'd gone through of attempting to create a semi-automatic shuriken gun, he was proud of every weapon he'd come up with. It was the one thing he would admit to being a nerd about – but this was high tech engineering, really, so Neptune argued that that made him more of an intellectual.

The fourteen year old currently had a desk all to himself, his most recent weapons designs spread next to him, and various book on weapons, tactics, and theory scattered about. His mind swam with frustration and no small amount of fatigue.

In preparation for building their own weapons, their Schematics class had been assigned to pick a weapon type, and write an essay evaluating its pros and cons. Neptune normally cranked out essays as easy as breathing, but this one was stretching him thin, and he was starting to feel light headed. Every time he thought he had all the information down, he'd remember another design idea he'd had, and attempt to work a discussion of that into the essay's dialogue. He'd passed the page maximum about three days ago – but he'd been planning his weapon for years! He was effectively trying to smush 14 years' worth of weapons fantasising into one essay!

And it didn't help that every so often, a fervent _tap-tap-tap _echoed through the library. The noise had been plaguing him inconsistently for a few hours now, so that every time he got on a consistent train of thought, the interruption would declare itself and he'd be distracted just long enough to derail whatever concept he'd been planning. He could have come up with five different weapons by now, if not for that noise.

He glanced at his watch – it was getting late. He really hoped some drunk upperclassmen weren't stumbling around the library. He knew he'd been spending too much time on this essay, and he really did want to enjoy the last night of the break with his friends. Sage and Scarlett were getting sick of him not being around to hang out.

He shook his head and attributed the noise to his overworked brain. Neptune settled back into his chair and picked up a sketchbook to flip through to clear his thoughts.

As he did, a vague image was beginning to form. He could almost see his weapon: a combination of his three favourite designs, melding perfectly into one! A trident, glaive, and tazer gun. Yes, if he concentrated his essay on pole weapons with an aside on tazer features, he could cover everything that he wanted his weapon to be!

Invigorated, Neptune highlighted entire sections of his essay to remove (and saved them in another file in case of future use – you never know!). With that, his essay was complete, but Neptune was so energized from finally figuring out his weapon that he settled right into the fine detailing of the workings of the weapon itself. He was fully immersed in the work for another half hour before the large campus clock rang from outside, reminding him that it was already 11:30.

He should really be back with Scarlet and Sage by now…

Oh, but if he could just figure out a transition for the elecrtocharge router to the glaive and trident forms! I was proving difficult. He felt like he was on the verge of something, maybe if the change was wired through –

_Crack – sloop – thwak – thwak – thwak - !_

"Yeow!"

Neptune's pen stabbed through three pages. His heart raced with trepidation. There was no way he could mistake that for anything other than what it was: someone else was in the library, and they were interrupting his work!

If people wanted to be here, fine, but he'd just about _had it_ that time!

Neptune felt a burst of anger – maybe his fatigue had finally plateaued into pure adrenalin – and he slammed his book shut.

He shoved up from his chair, the feet protesting against the mahogany floorboards, then he stood silent, listening.

Sounds of shuffling echoed through the library. He looked every way, realising suddenly just how vast the library was. He was on the middle floor, with one floor below him, and three more above. In this end of the library, the floors were all open to each other, creating the illusion of book stacks that went on for stories. A giant statue spanning the first two floors jutted through the space, lit from above by a multi-coloured, dust powered chandelier.

All of this open, echo-y space made it very difficult to pinpoint where the noise was coming from. Out of pure frustration, he decided to disregard the safety rules for first years, and activated his semblance.

Neptune brought his fingertips to his temple, he hoped he wouldn't always need this handicap, but for right now it helped him get it going. His brows knitted in concentration, he blinked and his eyes shifted from his normal blue to a glowing violet, and he sent out the first wave of his eco-location.

That wasn't the most accurate way of describing it, but it was the best he had for right now. He didn't need to emit a noise himself, but he could see sound waves pulsing through the air. From the balcony, he looked around at the levels around him. Lines of sound bounced off the chandelier in every direction, impossible to decipher. Neptune groaned and shook his head, already feeling a migraine coming on. He turned back to his floor, and saw that the sounds were actually emanating from a corner on this level. He blinked rapidly to clear his eyes, which cleared back to their normal colour.

As he drew closer to this corner of the library the sounds sounded as if they were becoming louder – not because he was getting closer, but in the sense that whoever was making them seemed to be becoming more frantic by the second.

Neptune stalked the stalks, tracking the source of the noise. He came to a row where a pile of books were fallen ramshackle to the floor. Scuffling sounds could be heard from a few rows over. What was this airhead's _problem_? Didn't they understand that libraries were for quiet?

Neptune started gathering the books in a knee-jerk reaction before he even realised what he was doing. Well, he reasoned, no point leaving them on the floor to get stepped on. He searched for their call number and had to step back when he figured out where they'd come from.

"All the way up there?" he murmured, staring up at the highest shelf. There was no ladder in sight – so was the person who had gotten these really that tall? Neptune gulped at the prospect of confronting an older student. There was no way Neptune could reach that shelf, so he left the book on a trolley nearby, and continued his investigation of the noise.

The scuffling suddenly pattered above him, to his shock, and he looked up just in time to see a flash of bright yellow dash across the top of the shelves.

His trepidation over crossing an older, larger student was forgotten in his surprise and he cried out.

"Hey!"

A burst of light exploded a few shelves over, showering golden sparks. He stared in shock, but managed to recover and give chase.

"No, no, no!" came a voice from up ahead. Neptune reached the corner of the stands where the voice was coming from. Carefully, he peeked around the corner, and froze at what he saw.

Sitting among the books was a boy. The first thing that startled Neptune was that he actually looked Neptune's age, not the behemoth upperclassman Neptune had expected. The extraordinary bit was that the boy was sitting literally _among the books_ – he'd scaled the shelves and was sitting squeezed between them on the top shelf.

Suddenly more scuffling could be heard from above – were there _two_ crazy bookstack-climbers in here?

A bright yellow light, the same as what Neptune had seen before, leapt from a nearby bookshelf, a book in hand. It halted next to the boy in the bookshelf, and Neptune got a chance to assess its features, realizing that it was some kind of copy of the boy sitting right there. _Was that his semblance?_

"Took you long enough," the boy grumbled, throwing aside the book he'd been looking at and grabbing the book the copy held out to him.

Before Neptune study the copy any closer, the copy exploded in the same shower of light that Neptune had seen before.

Neptune barely managed to cover up an embarrassing squeak of surprise, but the boy on the bookshelf remained unfazed by the small pyrotechnics as he frantically flipped through the pages of the book he'd been handed.

Neptune worked up his nerve, and came out from around the corner.

"Hey – you know you shouldn't be up there." He said in a stern voice. He waited but the boy did nothing.

"Hey!" he repeated. The boy didn't seem to hear him, engrossed in the book and muttering to himself.

"HEY! Want to keep it down?!" His yell startled to boy out of his concentration, who jolted in his spot. Neptune went to rush forward to catch him, but all of a sudden the boy seemed to catch himself mid-air. Neptune tried to see if another clone had appeared to somehow catch him, but it turned out the boy had one more surprise for Neptune.

"Geeze, yelling about being quite, and you nearly make me fall on my face? What's your problem?"

Neptune could only stutter in response.

The boy seemed completely unperturbed by the fact that he was in a precarious angle off the edge of the bookshelf, balancing on his heels, and only held up by grip of a long, blonde tail.

Neptune's train of thought was cut off by the guy suddenly pulling his entire body back to the shelf (just by his tail!), then flipping onto the floor in front of him. He landed perfectly among a pile of his discarded books.

"Look, if you're this big a nerd to be criticizing me for my volume, then maybe you can help me out. I have been _all over _this place looking for stuff for Prof. Orion's essay, and I can't make heads or tails of anything in here!"

Neptune believed him. Despite the guy's energetic voice, his shoulders were sagging, and the skin below his eyes was clouded by dark rings. His tail flicked in frustration, and Neptune was having a hard time not staring. He'd seen faunus before, but only a few with tails, and if this guy had been holding himself up with it on that bookshelf then he must use it for all sorts of things – some kind of simian, to have such dexterity –

Oh Dust.

"_It was you_," Neptune mumbled.

"Whassat?" the boy asked. He leaned forward to hear Neptune better, but didn't expect Neptune to meet him halfway with a raised fist and an angry snarl.

"Don't tell me you've literally been climbing all over the library shelves! You've been distracting me from Orion's essay you know! I could have been done hours ago!" Neptune cried.

The guy's only response to his angry outburst however, was a bright, disarming grin.

"No kidding! We're in the same year? My name's Sun. Listen, if you help me out then I won't have to do this anymore," he scuffed one of the discarded books with his sneaker to indicate that 'this' meant his mad, haphazard search.

Neptune could only gape at the casual conversational whiplash.

"Honestly, I've got all the information, but we need _references_ and I just can't find the right books."

"Really?" Neptune sputtered. "You mean you weren't just trying to find the most difficult shelves to climb and hope that you found the right book in the process?"

Sun laughed, clutching his stomach to keep himself together.

"Dude, I had this place scaled the first day I got in here. I just didn't, you know…"

"What?" Neptune asked. "Actually enter the library until this essay was assigned?"

Sun grinned at him, and Neptune groaned.

"I'm not helping some guy who just started the day before this was due," Neptune said. "Now, If you can keep it down, I have to get back to my stuff. Have fun being up all night. I'm going home."

Neptune stormed back to his table, but that damn _tap-tap-tap_ followed him just as restlessly as ever.

"No! Come on!" The guy jumped after him. "Look I've got notes and stuff from class."

Neptune cringed at the wrinkled papers the boy pulled out of his back pocket. They were riddled thick with notes at least, though they were illegible to Neptune's eye. He grabbed them from the boy and squinted at them.

"Check it out," Sun said, arms raised in grand gesture, "a bo staff, that turns into nun chucks –"

"Well that doesn't sound very structurally sound –"

"– and the nun chucks are also SHOTGUNS!"

Neptune stared, gape jawed. It sounded awesome, he was loath to admit. His brain was already whirring with the mechanics of it. But he didn't say anything out loud. Sun saw that Neptune's reaction was still carefully unimpressed, and sighed.

"Look, I have, like, parts of the essay, but my weapon is _three_ things. How am I supposed to write something that covers all three?" He reached into his other jean pocket to pull out another stack of papers covered in detailed schematics.

"I've got it worked out. So what do I need the essay for?" He stared at the pages with a scowl.

At this point Neptune noticed that Sun's hand were shaking as he held his papers. The realization came a moment before Sun stumbled, and Neptune rushed to catch him.

"Hey, easy. How long have you been working on this?"

"I'm fine…" he mumbled, suddenly seeming bulldozed by his fatigue.

"You wasted your energy using your semblance," Neptune realized. "You could have asked someone for help before it got to this, you know."

Sun huffed and brushed Neptune off, regaining his composure. "I'm dyslexic. I couldn't figure out the catalogue system if I tried. I figured if I used my semblance, I could check more books faster. I can almost sustain two clones at once now, so at least I got to practice with that!"

He's grinning again and, despite himself, Neptune returned it. He'd never met someone before who could twist something seemingly dismal in a positive light. Sun's eyes flitted to Neptune's table, and landed on Neptune's schematics for his own weapon.

"Dude, is that yours?" Before Neptune can respond, Sun is hunched over the table, running his finger over the schematics and taking them in with a keen eye.

Neptune watched Sun's excited hands flit through the notes and found himself impressed by his comments. From what he was hearing, Sun seemed to have pretty good technical knowledge of the mechanics.

"Yeah, it is. I'm just having trouble figuring out how to power the charged blade on the glaive and trident. See…" He trailed off as Sun produced a pen from who-knew-where and began scribbling on Neptune's plan.

"How about that?" Sun asked, leaning back so Neptune could see. He pointed to where his blunt pencil had smudged new marks over Neptune's precise penmanship. Neptune sucked in a breath, feeling boneless with shock.

"How did you do that?" He gasped. "You figured it out – just like that."

Sun breathed a laugh. "I can't take all the credit. I was in the workshop, and some older students were messing around with their weapons. One of them had a battle-ax with an electro-charged blade. I thought it was cool so he showed me how it worked. I have a pretty good memory when it comes to stuff I've put together or heard, so I guess it stuck."

Neptune winced and berated himself for thinking this guy was just some mindless slacker looking to mooch off of a book-y nerd.

Sun's notes crinkled in Neptune's hands. Neptune thought back to the extra files on shotguns and bo-staffs he'd saved on his laptop. He pulled out the chair next to him for Sun.

"Come on," he said, "I have some extra notes."

"Really?" Sun asked.

Neptune rustled through the papers and binders until he found the ones on what Sun would need.

"You can take notes from these," Neptune said. "I have all the sources in there as well, so you should have no problem."

"Dude, you are a lifesaver!" Sun crowded right next to him and flicked through the pages.

Neptune smiled, this time meaning it fully.

They worked in silence. Sun on his essay, Neptune on his schematic, fine-tuning now that Sun had solved his biggest roadblock.

The library was quiet but for their hushed mumbling and the click of pens and keyboards. For the first time during the break, Neptune felt a calm wash over him as he worked. He thought of when they would get to begin constructing their prototypes and his eyes slid to the faunus next to him. Neptune had always been the type to work alone, but now he couldn't imagine working without Sun's penchant for positivity, and surprisingly agile mind.

"Want to be partners when we get to go into the workshop to start prototypes?" Neptune asked.

Sun hmmm-ed in agreement, mouth quirked, and tail flicking with joy.


End file.
